Morphine dreams and soothing fibs in the ALP ER

When questioned yesterday on the 'Malaysia Solution', Prime Minister Julia Gillard made some extremely soothing noises.

AAP: Patrick Caruana, file photo

The fact that Kevin Rudd spent a large chunk of yesterday under a general anaesthetic did not preclude him from a dominant role in the day's discourse on politics.

For News Limited's opinion website The Punch, he submitted a call to alms for Africa, a moving piece of writing based on his recent travels to famine-plagued Somalia.

To The Australian, he contributed a wordy existential piece on the contemporary concept of The West.

"Great strengths lie, therefore, in the collective software, and in the consequential hardware, of what we over time have called this idea of the West. This is a civilisation patrimony that must not be surrendered meekly," read the fruitiest of the lines from the published piece, emailed to me by a friend who by coincidence is also presently recovering from surgery, and whose opiate-enhanced consequential hardware had responded particularly to Mr Rudd's musings on civilisation patrimony.

Though it may sound as if the Foreign Minister was already counting backwards from 100 when he penned those bits, the Australian column was actually an extract from a recent speech. It is clear that Mr Rudd is recovering his powers of rhetoric.

The Prime Minister, however, seems still to be struggling. If the Foreign Minister sounds, occasionally, like a modern-day Coleridge waking up from a foreign policy morphine dream, the PM sounds like a recovery room nurse, telling soothing fibs over and over in a firmly patronising tone.

Take yesterday, when Ms Gillard fronted up for an interview with ABC Radio's AM program. She was asked about the "Malaysian Solution", the arrangement with Malaysia arrived at in breach of the Gillard Government's promise not to send asylum seekers to countries who haven't signed the UN's refugee convention. The agreement was formalised last week, an occasion which the Government also used to confirm that its initial promise to backdate the removal of asylum seekers to May 7 would not be honoured. At the weekend, when the first Malaysia-liable boatload of asylum seekers arrived, the Government further signalled that it would not do anything so rash as to actually apply its strict announced policy of hustling any such arrivals back across the Java Sea within 72 hours.

When questioned yesterday on this point, the PM made extremely soothing noises.

"What I can guarantee is that we will do exactly what we've announced we were going to do, letter by letter, word by word," she reassured.

At this point, the listener might feel entitled to develop the panicky fretfulness of an amputee being assured his leg will grow back.

Why on Earth would a commitment to the letter of the promise be convincing, when the issue all along for the Gillard Government has been marked by the serial unreliability of its public statements?

Reporter Naomi Woodley asked the Prime Minister how, given the length of time the Malaysian arrangement had taken to negotiate, the Government still wasn't in a position to implement it according to its own rules.

"Well, I think it just stands to common sense that the first time you do something, obviously you learn along the way and there are things that need to be done for the first time that then for the second time are more routine," the PM soothed.

"So it's really nothing more than the simple common sense that applies to any human activity."

The numbing assault of Ms Gillard's logic here is tough to withstand, and the easiest instinct is to meekly surrender one's civilisation patrimony. But the stubborn patient might yet querulously persist. If the simplest common sense dictates that a 72-hour turnaround is not immediately feasible, then why promise one? And if common sense dictates that having done something once, one learns from the experience the second time around, how come that doesn't apply to the premature announcement of offshore processing agreements?